IDF Spring 2006 Coverage: Day 1 (Continued)

I continue reporting from the IDF sessions. What is new on the mobility front? Merom processor, Santa Rosa platform, new Intel NAND Robson technology reducing the boot-up time. Also, I will touch upon some hot enterprise news: Truland, Bensley and the world’s first quad-core DP Clovertown demo, . And there is more to follow!

Table of Contents

Enterprise News

The next keynote speech devoted to the innovations in the enterprise segment was delivered by Pat Gelsinger, Intel Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Digital Enterprise Group. He started with the communication infrastructure. There have always been many technology battles. But in the communication area the conclusion is the same all the time: IP wins. TCPIP has won and will continue to win. Skype added 200,000 users per day. This is the first generation of services on top of IP.

The next one is IP TV. It is not just about delivering TV, but about all the services that go with it such as gaming, conferencing, etc. We have every right to state that we are observing a Moore’s law type growth of IP based services. In the future we will have everything over IP, and it is just a matter of time before it become this way.

What does it take to deliver all this? As IP applications spread more and more, so do the growth requirements and storage requirements. It is huge industry and a lot of diverse solutions are needed to satisfy the ever growing demand. Intel demonstrated an enterprise storage solution for small businesses that can offer up to 2TB of storage space with Intel low power Xscale technology.

Another great solution for IT environment is such capabilities as virtualization. VT enhanced hardware will bring virtualization to the mainstream. Intel has already begun shipping VT hardware and according to them, the response was huge. This year they delivered over 13 million of VT enabled CPUs, which gave them the reason to think of VT as a roadmap. And they have already begun putting this roadmap into life.

Intel also announced virtualization technology for directed I/O. It allows I/O devices to be assigned to virtual machines and thus increase robustness. The specifications are released and available today.

One more major announcement that we witnessed today was the announcement of collaboration between Intel and VMWare on virtualization. Intel first started talking about virtualization 7 years ago. According to Pat Gelsinger, their customers loved virtualization and anything Intel would do to make it more enhanced was welcomed very enthusiastically. People built virtual machines and share them to really feel the benefits of virtualization. In addition to complimentary virtualization projects Intel and VMWare were working on, they brought the marketing and sales teams together to educate their customers more efficiently.

Another collaboration worth mentioning here is the one between Intel and IBM. The major goal of this alliance is to extend x86 virtualization technology into I/O and storage devices using VT-D capabilities, so that customers could truly optimize their server investments. Intel today announced their intention to deliver LV Xeon processor for high-density data center computing.